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Defenders of Gene Jones highlight his reputation for personal attention to the needs of tenants. But critics decry the bottleneck caused by his insistence on funneling councillor requests through one person, and the defunct tenant rep system that has left residents confused and lacking an essential resource.

Susan Gapka, who lives in a downtown TCHC building and is an outspoken advocate for tenants’ rights, said the ongoing controversies in Jones’ office have been distracting the agency from its job of taking care of tenants.

“It’s been a real rollercoaster ride — times are uncertain for us. We just don’t know what to expect next,” she said.

Gapka has been filling in as tenant representative in her building since the one elected in 2009 stopped doing the job. For the more than 164,000 tenants who live in TCHC housing, the tenant representative system provided clear leaders and contact points in each building or area.

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The TCHC halted the tenant representative program in 2012 in order to study and revamp it — a process that continues. Meanwhile, many who formerly held the role have moved on.

“A number of tenant representatives have lost interest, become ill, moved, and some have even died,” she said.

Jones took over as CEO of the housing agency in 2012 on a wave of enthusiasm fueled by his reputation south of the border as someone who can fix ailing public housing bodies. Jones’ personal attention to tenants is often praised, however Gapka says that doesn’t go far enough.

“While I think it’s good popular politics to show up and to promise things, it’s not Gene Jones’ job to implement those — it’s Gene Jones’ job to have fair and equitable hiring practices to put the management in place to ensure those jobs get done in a timely manner,” said Gapka.

Several councillors said Jones forbade front-line staff from meeting with them and appointed a single person to handle concerns from the city’s 44 councillors. That person was Lisa-Joan Overholt, an employee with close ties to Ford whose hiring and rapid promotion was singled out as one of the five especially “egregious” violations of human resources principles in the recent report.

“I think, certainly, he said a lot of the great things I would expect an ambitious and energized new CEO to say. He talked about collaboration and partnership, and I took him at his word,” said Wong-Tam. “What followed afterwards contradicted what he initially said to us, and that was about the partnership and collaboration.”

Soon, Wong-Tam started noticing turnover at the organization, where her staff would often speak with different managers within the housing agency. Then, all contact with the managers ended.

“We were advised by staff and managerial staff … that they weren't allowed to talk to us any more,” said Wong-Tam. “Shortly afterwards, they said all the communication needs to go through one person, and then there was a councillor liaison that was assigned to manage us, which of course was not going to work. You can’t have one person managing all the councillor expectations, because it creates a bottleneck effect.”

Michael Shapcott, director of housing and innovation at the Wellesley Institute, said that during Jones’ time, the TCHC hasn’t made progress on its two goals: to maintain the current housing stock and expand available housing. The repair backlog, estimated at more than $860 million in 2013, continues to grow. The waiting list for housing is the size of a small town’s population and the highest it’s ever been, according to Shapcott, at 91,413 households.

“I think TCHC faces, and has faced for a number of years, an almost impossible set of challenges. The last two years, under Gene Jones, that time has been distracting. TCHC has taken its eye off what its core mandates really are, and that’s a real problem,” said Shapcott.

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